“Our life is at the mercy of the gentiles,” my great-grandmother said to my grandfather after a Muslim boy beat him to the point of bleeding. This is one of many stories that reflect the life of the Jews of Baghdad and more generally, the experience of many Jews in...
“The Wrong Kind of Jew”: How the Erasure of Mizrahi Jews Shifts the Narrative about the Jewish People
This November, many within the Jewish community observed Mizrahi Heritage Month, a time dedicated to bringing visibility to a historically underrepresented Jewish demographic in the Western world, the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East. After the Jewish people were exiled from their ancestral homeland of Israel and entered...
Mizrahi Jews: The Beauty of Jewish Diversity and the Lie of Israeli ‘Colonialism’
This November, CAMERA on Campus observed Mizrahi Heritage Month through the latest iteration of our Mizrahi Stories campaign, a collaborative effort with partners JIMENA, The American Sephardic Federation, Sephardic Community Alliance, SAMI (Sephardic American Mizrahi Initiative), and Harif. The campaign included participants from the United States, Canada, Israel, and the...
Mizrahi Heritage Month: An untold story
The satisfying crunch of a piece of tadig at Friday night Shabbat dinner; the sweet aroma of a freshly brewed cup of cardamom tea; the melodic, flowy notes of a traditional Persian song. These are likely not the sights, smells, and sounds that come to mind when asked about Judaism....